08.05.15

Hello all:

Thank you so much for all of the supplies! We have so much and we are grateful for everything!

*** We have handed out agendas and we are asking for $5 for them. Two of you have already paid, so thanks! If you have any questions, feel free to ask us.***

We wanted to check in with you today. Our week is going great and we have enjoyed getting to know all of your scholars. Some of you may have some questions about DOJO points. We are docking students for every call out and off task behavior. We are doing this in order to reinforce procedures and learn how to participate in our classroom community. Your scholar may be receiving negative points in these first few weeks but we hope that in learning our classroom procedures this number will decrease. It is important that in these first weeks we strongly reinforce these expectations with your scholars.

We have discussed with the scholars the different ways to gain and lose points on DOJO. As part of their homework scholars are being held accountable for teaching you all the ins and outs of DOJO. This should include what the + and - behaviors look like. If you have any questions about DOJO after you have spoken with your scholars please shoot us an email and we will do our best to answer your questions!

We encourage you to ask your students what they learn each day. When students can recall and explain what they learned to their family and loved ones, it reinforces the material. One thing that we encourage you to practice daily with your scholar is Accountable Talks. We are teaching the scholars how to have meaningful conversations with one another. We use sentence stems and practice how to speak effectively and precisely with one another. Also, ask them to teach you their non-verbal hand signals for Accountable Talks.

I have attached below the Accountable Talk stems that we are using in the classroom.

Last but not least we have some information for you all around Independent Reading logs (IRL). Students are required to read a minimum of 20 minutes per night. They have a log in their homework folder that they should be filling out every night and having a parent or guardian sign it. Also, they should be logging the pages that they have read. Each week students will have skill to focus on. For example this week we are focusing on picking out unfamiliar vocabulary. The second page of the log is a place for students to respond to the text that they are reading (this week that page will be for vocabulary). The IRL will be checked and periodically graded.

I know this is a lot of information so if you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail me and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Have a great day!